


Sharing space

by down



Series: Scenes from a long recovery [4]
Category: Magic Knight Rayearth
Genre: Multi, pre-ish-ot3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-14
Updated: 2020-03-14
Packaged: 2021-02-23 10:55:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,435
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23143711
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/down/pseuds/down
Summary: Eagle was used to not having much privacy.His recovery stole the last of it.
Relationships: Lantis/Shidou Hikaru/Eagle Vision
Series: Scenes from a long recovery [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/880152
Comments: 1
Kudos: 15





	Sharing space

Eagle was used to not having much privacy.

With his mother away with her ship a lot, and his father so busy, he had been boarding in schools not long after he started attending – and after that there were the dorms at the Academy. At least, at school, there had been curtains between the beds – and fewer to a room. Mostly you even got to stay with your friends. The Academy had whole classes of first years in one or two rooms – even the showers were shared, though there were sets for gender groups.

It was deliberate, he knew; quarters on ship were always cramped. Better to find out early if you couldn’t handle living with so many other people about you. (Especially ones you didn’t like. You were never going to be friends with your entire crew – no matter how much effort you put into it.)

Smaller rooms were reserved for those who stayed at the Academy beyond the basic year and a half of training – those on officer courses could attain small private rooms for just them. So they could focus on their studies, officially – unofficially, as another bribe to work hard and excel. But Eagle had been taking so many classes (and trying to get to know as many of his fellow students at the same time) that he’d almost never been in it except to crash and sleep… and he’d given Geo access even back then, to come check he hadn’t slept through his alarms in the morning and would make it to his first seminar of the day.

Graduation meant his first posting – he’d dropped his boxes off in his new tiny room in the Watchtower and shipped straight out, Geo still at his side, and as junior officers they’d both been sharing the officer’s quarters with the three others. Only the captain had an individual room.

So by the time he’d been given his own ship, with his own berth, Eagle had been used to sharing space – particularly with Geo, who by now had access to his quarters as a matter of course. (Eagle was curious what people thought about that, sometimes. It didn’t really matter; most captains and their seconds functioned like a couple, even when they didn’t sleep together, and there were enough protocols in place to stop any abuse of position. The constant monitoring was another way they lacked privacy, but again something they all just accepted as fair in the circumstances.)

The captain’s quarters included a desk where he could plan their course, and actions; a unit for drinks, a couple of chairs – and there was even a tiny shower in the private head. As his second, Geo spent a lot of time going over things with him in there anyway, and it was closer to the officer’s quarters than the general bathing station. It only made sense that Geo shower there as well – especially, Geo seemed to feel, when it meant they could keep the door open so he could continue arguing with Eagle throughout.

Then there was Zazu, who was fine sleeping – well, wherever, and all too often in the workshops, but who went through a phase of being self-concious in the shared showers. He was so much younger than anyone else on board, especially their first ship. Eagle offered him the use of his own; it wasn’t like the boy wasn’t the undeclared mascot of the ship anyway, so no one was going to argue a few small special measures. Not when he could make the engines sing like that. And Zazu spent a great deal of time covered in oil and grease. So that meant Zazu wandering in at odd hours to borrow the shower, too. Given the size of the rooms in his first few commands, even two people wandering through was a lot.

The NSX, though – the NSX was a darling. The –SX class ships were the flagships of the fleet, designed to pack just as much of a punch with their design as with their weaponry. There were individual rooms for all the officers, senior and junior, and even engineering had their own quarters. (Zazu turned up in Eagle’s rooms a lot anyway, but he was senior engineer now, and apparently thought reports a good enough excuse to come bug them. Never mind the fact that he sent all his reports electronically. )

…Habit, however, was harder to break. And with so many people under his command, letting just two of them into his space was having privacy. Then whenever they were back in Autozam, he was back in that little Watchtower room, sharing facilities with the rest of them. (Space was more limited on Autozam than in space, in some ways – they could buy in resources for other lands to build large ships, but they were running out of space to expand the plates and domes which they lived in at home.)

He always had the privacy of his thoughts. Some things he hid from everyone – and then when he began to feel unwell, right through to his diagnosis and beyond, he kept that private as well. Even from the people he let into his space; they were, after all, the people most likely to stop him.

Cephiro took away even that.

He was thankful for his life, of course – glad beyond words for this salvation, all unexpected, which reached out to his land as well as himself. But that coma took the last vestiges of privacy and threw them away. It took some time to learn to speak mind-to-mind without his emotions and stray thoughts seeping across to whoever he spoke to, and his body was entirely given up to the care of the Cephiran doctors – healers. Even once he woke up, they shared the same single-minded focus of the doctors back home – everything to do with their patient was their domain, and he was lucky if they remembered to knock before they came in, so used to him being unable to respond to it that they had got entirely out of the habit. Particularly as the suite he was in was, technically, in the healer’s wing of the castle.

Eagle wasn’t used to much privacy, but by the time he was up and walking again he was badly missing the little he’d had.

And then Lantis offered him the guest bedroom in his own suite.

He should have stopped and thought about it – but he said yes immediately, and only stopped to think it through once Lantis had gone to get the healer’s approval for his moving. (Or possibly to tell them that Eagle was moving, with or without their approval. He’d seen Eagle wince when the one this morning knocked and walked straight in anyway.)

They hadn’t talked about – anything. Lantis had just been there, supporting him, all through this recovery; they hadn’t even talked about the way Lantis brought Hikaru to see him at every possible opportunity, the way both of them smiled more when she was around. (There wasn’t much more to talk about, there, not now; nothing except the agreement they were both comfortable waiting. It had taken a long time for Eagle to wake up, but not that long.)

Neither of them had mentioned the fact that Eagle was going to leave, to go back to Autozam, the way Lantis had come back to Cephiro.

Sharing space with Lantis should have been something they talked about, because even when they had been on Autozam together, Lantis had been staying outside the Watchtower – he had consulted for the military, but had never joined up.

(He had never really planned to stay.)

So it was new – but then, with the living room between them, with a lock on the bathroom door, sharing Lantis’s rooms turned out to give so much privacy from each other that Eagle missed having Geo wandering through. (Geo, who was in temporary possession of the NSX and the captain’s cabin, and would doubtless have found a dozen places to stash emergency supplies of sweets all over it.)

Then again… that shared lounge, between the two bedrooms, slowly became one of Eagle’s favourite places. Lantis had given him free access to it, and Hikaru the same; slowly, the three of them spent more time together there in the evenings, everyone else shut away behind the door. That shared privacy felt just as easy as having Geo wandering through his space, or looking round to find Zazu wandering in with oil dripping from his hair.

Maybe one day it would extend to his bedroom, too. But just now, this was good.


End file.
